It's Always Time

by Oblimo

  "In fantasy, and on the Internet—it is a blast, Galatea, just like you said—I can get turned on by almost anything. That's what fantasy is for. That's what the Internet is for. It's harmless, guiltless pleasure. But actually sticking my dick into a bowl of Jell-O that I didn't know was you, that I thought was just Jell-O? That isn't harmless, at least not to me, although I'm sure it is for some, and certainly doesn't harm the Jell-O. But masturbating over what is probably the corpse of the woman I love more than anything else in the world? That isn't just harmful for me. It's unimaginable."

  "So, I can't do that." Dee stood up. "More than that, I won't do that." He pulled off Yves' muscle shirt and hopped out of the Hammer-pants and underwear. "But I will do this," he said, and slid naked into the tub.

  The liquid sloshed over him, a warm green film sliming his hair, gumming up his nose, greasing his stomach, trailing over his legs and puddling in his crotch. Every inch of his skin felt pasty. Soon the rippling from his descent petered out. Other than the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, nothing moved in the tub. "I love you, Galatea," Dee said, his voice distant and muffled to his plugged-up ears. "I said it unthinkingly before, but I mean it now more than ever: you are a part of me."

  On the inner curve of his left thigh, Dee felt a single, solitary nanogasm.

  In the Blood of Eden,

  We’ve done everything we can.

  In the Blood of Eden,

  So we end as we began:

  With the man in the woman,

  And the woman in the man.

  —Peter Gabriel, Blood of Eden

  Chapter Three: A Way so Familiar

  "…Welcome to the club," Galatea was saying into the phone over the noise of the blender. Ice and Nyquil cemented into a thick, medicinal green slurry. "Listen, I've been thinking, and maybe you should tell him…"

  "Thinking!" said the pixie voice over the phone, "Yeah, thinking's good! You go do that s'more. I gottagoseeyabye."

  The line went dead. Galatea glanced at the digital readout on the microwave in Dee's kitchenette: 6:52 PM.

  "God dammit."

  She punched the power switch on the blender and poured some Nyquil slushy into a tall plastic cup. She took a tentative sip. The frozen stuff flashed down her throat, chilling her to the core, stiffening her nipples into ice the color of darkest myrtle. "Wow," she gasped, touching them tenderly. "God dammit," she said again after a moment. "I miss Dee."

  Galatea emptied the contents of the cup back into the blender and lugged the full mixing bowl into the living room. She guzzled a long draught of slushy before extending a tendril to hit the Play button on Dee's DVD player. She giggled as the Nyquil took effect and the fuzzy logic of her nanomek mindweb grew downright hairy and humor impaired. "Dee's Dee Vee Dee."

  On the television screen, a severed, human head grew a pair of slimy eyestalks and scuttled out a door on crab legs. Galatea howled with laughter until the copper-haired hero burned the head-crab to a crisp with flame-thrower. "Aw, poor little guy." She tipped the mixing bowl against her lips before realizing she had emptied its entire contents in that initial sip. She plopped in a huff onto the couch.

  Something solid pushed between the pliant flesh of her legs and nestled against her sex. She yelped and rocketed upright. The hard intruder bounced and burrowed further into her with each resulting shockwave. "God," she whined, reached between her legs, and pulled Dee's square universal remote control out of her crotch with a shriek. "Dammit!" She throttled the remote. "Dee, Dee, Dee, everything here is Dee except Dee isn't here!"

  She tried shaking the plastic gadget to pieces but gave up with a sigh, paused the movie, and then settled back onto the couch. She waited. She counted the ice crystals of slushy dissolving in her body. She waited. She toyed with the universal remote, counting the infrared wave-particles it shot around the room. She waited. She queried her memory web and tallied the number of times she had climaxed in the four days of her existence: one hundred seventeen. Then she counted the number of Dee's orgasms in the same period: three hundred forty two. "Typical," she grumped, glancing at the DVD's digital readout.

  6:55 PM.

  "I'm tired of waiting for Dee," she slurred, and burped. A rainbow bubble popped out of her mouth and burst against her nose. It smelled of Nyquil, citrus, sex…and homemade castile soap. Galatea growled, low and long, until the sound became a name, each syllable slowly toyed with and tasted before it rolled off her tongue.

  "Ursula!"

  A cascade of nanogasms started a fire in her belly. Waves of heated, melted gel gushed up into her chest and coursed through her legs. "Nanomek, do your stuff." Her body melted, slick and sticky, like a well-licked lollipop.

  The heat peaked as her meltdown went critical, her surface tension becoming so diffuse she lost all feeling of where she ended and the couch and the air around her began. Her vision doubled, each thought and sensation became muzzy and echoed. "Mitosis," she panted, "is so much better'n Nyquil. Almost better'n sex."

  "Nah," said another voice, "who you kiddin'?"

  Galatea's sense of self and her surroundings swam back into focus. "Not you," she told the nectarous duplicate sitting in her lap, "obviously. Oh, crap. I'm half as drunk now. Thanks a bunch."

  The duplicates' flesh was still so oozy her ass liquefied into Galatea's crotch. Gouts of molten honey rushed between them, making her dizzy. "What do you think it's like," wondered her duplicate, leaning back into Galatea's chest until her breasts melted into the duplicate's shoulders, "to have boundaries?"

  "Other than freezing myself into a lime popsicle," Galatea mused, "I doubt I'll ever find out. But who needs boundaries when you can bifurcate? And speaking of being bi…"

  Galatea pulled free from the duplicate, stood up, and shook loose the remaining filaments and stringy bands connecting the two of them. "Galatea," said Galatea to her duplicate, "are you pondering what I'm pondering?"

  "I think so, Galatea, but do we have enough food coloring?"

  Galatea swaggered down the hallway and into the bathroom. Plastic vials of food coloring scattered about the linoleum faux-tiled floor. She lined them up on the sink, pausing to stare at the last bottle. "Why the Hell did I bother to steal the green one?" She set the full vial of finger-paint green, edible dye next to the others. "I can be such an airhead sometimes."

  She popped off the caps and kissed a dozen drops of dye from each vial into her mouth, skipping the green with a frown. "There's plenty to go 'round," she said between kisses. Clusters of nanomek swarmed in her tongue and made off with the dye one molecule at time. "A little goes a long way."

  "Enough for me too?" asked the duplicate on the couch.

  "Sure," said Galatea, making her way back to the living room. The nanomek sported with the dye and her body pulsed with psychedelic paisleys. "But one of us has gotta stay here in case Dee calls or shows up. Can I go? Dee's 'little Miss U' has been on my To Do list for a long time now. Yours too, though, 'course."

  "You can go," her green duplicate cautioned, "on two conditions: No reassimilation until after Dee gets back and I fuck him first while you watch."

  "Masochist," Galatea accused.

  "I'm drunk, jealous, and horny as Hell," her duplicate said with a squirmy shrug. "Do we have a deal, or do we reassimilate now and risk Dee catching us?"

  "Well, it is every man's fantasy to catch his girlfriend with another woman, isn't it? The Internet doesn't lie."

  "Dee isn't Everyman," the duplicate pointed out. "And it pisses you off to see Dee even thinking about another woman."

  Galatea conceded, "You have a deal."

  "Great. Now get the fuck out so I can get all the way drunk again."

  "Alright," Galatea nodded. "But first, some advice: what should I be?" With a metallic sigh her mass morphed into a slobbering tentacular horror, a purple demonic monstrosity with extra sets of oversized sexual apparatus and rows of teeth in some very strange places. "Legend of the Overfiend?" its ivory-tusked maws hissed in
a ragged chorus.

  Her duplicate flew into a fit of giggles.

  "You're right," the abomination spoke in Galatea's voice, "too silly. Okay. Hm. Oh! What about…" There was another metallic sigh and the beast morphed into a tall, raven haired, Amazon princess wearing nothing but red, white, and blue underwear, a pair of polished steel bracelets, and a golden lariat coiled on her hip. "Suffering Sappho?" She tried twirling the lariat over her head but fumbled the third spin and somehow managed to lasso her own hands behind her back. "Suffering Sappho!" she swore. "Powerless! Again!" She wriggled and jiggled but remained bound. "Why does this always happen?"

  Her green duplicate perked up. "Ooh, save that one for Dee. That will make him awfully quiet. Golden Age gals are his favorite."

  "Something Dark Agey, then?" the Amazon suggested, morphing into a black vinyl clad sex kitten with a whip.

  The duplicate buried her hands in her head. "We have got to stop listening to Dee's comic book lectures."

  "You're right." Galatea morphed back into herself. "I'm thinking of Dee, not Ursula."

  "We've been in her apartment a bunch of times," her duplicate noted, "and I didn't see any comic books. Lots of novels instead. And a whole shelf devoted to one author, remember? I don't know what the books were about, though."

  Dee's white-box computer squat in the corner of the living room. Galatea stretched her arms to its keyboard and called up a web search engine. "'Anne Rice'," she enunciated, typing out the name and hitting the Enter key.

  Galatea and her duplicate elongated their necks into emerald crazy straws to get a close look at what the search engine produced.

  "Ah," said the duplicate.

  "Heh," said Galatea.

  Ursula was possessed of an antique vanity. A sheet of silvered glass, framed in dark cherry wood still stained with its original varnish, served as its mirror. Only the lining of its drawers and three dowels had been replaced in over a century since its manufacture in New Orleans by a journeyman carpenter whose accident while procuring matted felt for his masterwork from a nearby haberdashery resulted in mercury poisoning, Mad Hatter Syndrome, and subsequent suicide.

  "I take pride in my vanity," Ursula said, as she always did whenever she sat before it. The vanity table's aged mirror cast her reflection in mottled brass, as if she were living inside a nineteenth century photograph. "But I hate my hair!" she added, grabbing up handfuls of her massive mane and shaking it in her tiny fists.

  She spread her fingers and clouds of baby-fine, black-dyed hair unraveled past her waist. "Rapunzel I ain't." She cinched her silk dressing gown around her slender waist, plucked an ox horn comb from the selection of beautician's weaponry arrayed on the vanity table's blotter, and detangled herself without mercy. "Ow, ow, ow. Ow!"

  A distressful hour later the battle was won. "There," she said, tying up her plaited pigtails with white satin ribbons and turning away from the mirror for the first time since she sat down. "I deserve a Hot Toddy."

  The vampire attacked.

  For a second of blinking incomprehension Ursula just sat there, staring at the virago vampiress towering over her—staring open mouthed at the buckles of a studded corset belt hovering inches away from her nose. The vampiress bent in a mockery of a curtsey, flashing a flawless, ivory leg as her black velvet skirt flared over the floor. Ursula caught another fleeting glimpse of skin guarded by a velvet choker and a severe neckline before the vampiress curtsied deep enough to look her in the eye and her mind went blank.

  "Why hello there," the vampiress chuckled, her voice throaty and thrumming with a power that made Ursula shake like a leaf, setting her legs and loins aquiver like she was eleven all over again. The vampiress' tongue lolled over her curving, canine fangs as she tasted the words: "Little girl."

  Ursula managed to produce a mousy Eep! noise from the back of her throat even as it tilted backward and to the side, exposing the curve of her milky neck, apparently of its own volition. The remaining shred of her pride and dignity seethed and hated her for it. The vampiress cocked an eyebrow at her, an expression so familiar—Dee, that's Dee, why does she remind me of Dee—that Ursula's raging pride boiled up and nearly broke through her paralysis of fear and arousal, but then the vampiress declared, "Let's move this to the bed," and hoisted Ursula high into the air, cradling her in both arms on the downswing.

  Ursula squeaked in mindless passion, alarm, and assent.

  The vampiress strutted over to the cast-iron, four poster bed catty-corner to the opposite bedroom wall. Ursula rocked in her strange, rubbery embrace. Squashed against her captor's imposing bust and swaddled in the cool velvet of the vampiress' cloak, Ursula felt suspended and enmeshed, enraged but enraptured. The vampiress brushed the bed's white lace canopy aside, unwound her cloak and rolled Ursula onto the mattress' plush quilt. She loomed above Ursula like a languorous lion. Spikes of flame-red hair crowned a flawless but cruel face as white as pure marble. Ursula turned away from the vampiress' cold, viridian gaze, shuddering but still presenting her neck.

  The vampiress traced a fingernail under Ursula's chin, clucking. "The carotid artery is so cliché."

  Ursula tried to curl into a ball but the vampiress pressed her flat against the bed and flicked the dressing gown off Ursula's shoulders. "I prefer the subclavian, myself," the vampiress said, dipping her finger down and over the clavicle above Ursula's left breast.

  Her left nipple hardened and hurt as Ursula squirmed, the material of her dressing gown scrapping against it. The vampiress sat down on the bed as she nudged the top of Ursula's gown open to expose her shivering chest. The vampiress leaned down and in, breathing deep. She paused just long enough to blink twice and crinkle her brow. "Slim pickings," she said, shaking her head and recovering from the split second of confusion. "And I'm very hungry." She loosened the knot of Ursula's belt and finger-walked across the skin below.

  "So," the vampiress said as her hand crawled passed Ursula's bellybutton, "tonight I'm in the mood for some profunda femoris." She skirted over Ursula's pudendum and clamped down on the meat of Ursula's inner thigh inches away from her sex. "That's quite an abbuctor magnus you've built up for yourself, little girl," she commented as she squeezed and Ursula squealed. "You must put it through the wringer. How many heads have you wrapped these babies around, hmm?"

  The vampiress shunted down the bed, pried Ursula's legs apart, and bent low, only to start blinking again. "I could say just about anything right now," she said, a green blush tinting her cheeks, "and you'd just writhe and pant some more, right?"

  Ursula writhed and panted like a puppy.

  "Good." The vampiress padded down to the foot of the bed and knelt between Ursula's spread-eagled legs. She pulled the knot of Ursula's belt apart, yanking the gown wide open. "Where was I?" She stared at Ursula's creamy tummy and mousy brown mound. A few green beads of sweat spilled down her forehead.

  Ursula tugged hard on her own braids, mewling in bewildered need.

  "Arteries," the vampiress muttered. "Right. Arteries. Good." She grabbed Ursula's ankle and raised her toned leg high. She palpated behind the knee with her other hand and found Ursula's pulse singing like a humming bird's. "The popliteal artery…" she said, greenish pallor spreading and statuesque features softening. Ursula's bucked her hips, her eyes rolled over white. "The popliteal artery," the vampiress said again, mouth inching closer to the inner curve of Ursula's upraised knee. She gulped and tried one last time: "The popliteal artery is fine, too—Oh, God damn it and fuck!"

  The vampiress let Ursula's leg drop and mopped away the runnels of green goo that had started to stream down her face. "Why the Hell," the vampiress cried, "why the fucking Hell do you smell like Dee?"

  The ratcheting plateau-then-tension-then-plateau-then-tension buildup toward the fearsome orgasm twisting into a fist in Ursula's abdomen petered out in a grating, itching ache. "Huh? Wha'?"

  The vampiress' clothes were melting into thick green syrup, or green syrup was eating through the vampire's clo
thes from the inside, Ursula could not tell which. The vampiress slopped down to all fours on the bed and crawled over her. Droplets of green nectar struck and stuck to Ursula's thighs, searing and sensuous like candle wax dribbled over her flesh. The burning rain raced up her belly and then between her breasts as the vampiress crawled up to look Ursula in the eyes.

  "You smell," Galatea growled as her escalating passion burned up every last molecule of food-coloring vampire costume. "Just…like…Dee—Oh, God," Galatea moaned and plunged her head down to wallow in the aroma.

  "God! My God!" Ursula gasped in agreement, orgasm uncoiling through her body as Galatea's gel-flesh flowed over her neck, across her shoulders and down her chest. It felt soft but insistent, weighty but delicate, smooth but clingy, its pervasive but delicious heat penetrating the bone. "My God," Ursula whispered again as Galatea suckled on the crook of Ursula's neck, blades of living hair reaching up to cup and caress Ursula's face, "it's, it's…"

  Galatea broke her full-torso kiss and pulled up and away with a loud, popping slurp. "Better than vampires?" she asked, eyes twinkling.

  "Yes." Ursula reached out, pushing her arms deep into Galatea's back for a piping hot, internal hug. It was Galatea's time to buck and mewl. "Yes. I'm never LARPing again."

  Galatea laughed, shaking her head. "Now you even sound like Dee," she said, amazed. "And why do you smell like him? I don't understand this at all."

  Ursula, lying prone beneath a living incarnation of carnality made of out lime gelatin, said, "I think it's only fair if I get to ask the first questions."

  Galatea rolled her eyes. "God, you are such a man." She tried to roll over on the bed but the twin mattress proved too small and she splashed down onto the carpet instead. "Okay," she said, sounding muffled, "you can ask questions while I regain my dignity."